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Sermon for May 4, 2014, St John the Divine, Victoria

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Over the last weekend, May 1-4, the Primate’s World Relief and Development Fund’s Youth Council met in Victoria, BC for our spring meeting. A lot was accomplished and we had a wonderful time meeting new members and enjoying the lovely surroundings of spring on the south Island.

On the Sunday morning, we had the opportunity to spread across four different Anglican churches in greater Victoria and share about the work of PWRDF. For some, public speaking is ‘old-hat’ and they are used to it, for others it is a scary event that needs coaching.

One of the wonderful things that youth council does, in addition to tell the stories of PWRDF, is develop young leaders from across Canada. Our speaking groups were made up of new youth council members and veterans. In my group was a brand new youth diocesan PWRDF ambassador. She’d spoken at her own church before, and at high school youth events, but never to a group as large or as unfamiliar as the congregation at St John the Divine, Victoria. So I did most of the talking, and she told a story in the middle. She did an excellent job and I think we’ll be hearing more from her in the years to come!

Because we couldn’t all be in the same place, I said I would post my sermon for those interested. The gospel reading from last Sunday was the Road to Emmaus, found in Luke 24:13-35. We focussed on that reading for our preparation for speaking, and I also spoke out of my knowledge of the engagement St John’s has with their community.

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Good morning!

Thank you for having us here this morning! It is an honour to be worshipping with you.

We are members of the Primate’s World Relief and Development Fund’s justgeneration program – a body of youth from coast-to-coast who care deeply about the work of the PWRDF are involved in both speaking with the Board of Directors in order to bring a youth voice to that forum and in developing resources and telling the stories of our PWRDF partners in such a way as to engage youth.

A group of 16 of us have been having our spring meeting in Victoria for the last three days and this morning we are excited to be spread across Victoria, talking about the work of PWRDF in different Anglican churches. I am thankful to be back worshipping with you this morning, along with Matt from Winnipeg and Gillian from Brandon.

We have had a full weekend, participating in the lock-in hosted at the Cathedral on Friday night, meeting together as a group in the beautiful and peaceful surroundings of a retreat centre by the ocean in Metchosin, and talking and sharing with each other as we have been preparing meals and eating together throughout the weekend.

Immersed as we have been in eating good food and discussing issues relief and development and food security, it is unsurprising that talk of food jumped out to us as we were reading through the gospel as a group this weekend.

The gospel writer writes:

As they came near the village to which they were going, Jesus walked ahead as if he were going on. But they urged him strongly, saying, “Stay here with us, because it is almost evening and the day is nearly over.” So he went in to stay with them.

When he was at the table with them, he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them. Then their eyes were opened and they recognized him.

They recognized Jesus in the sharing of food in the breaking of the bread.

This got us thinking about the centrality of food in our lives and how important food really is to daily life.

Most of you, I am sure, participate in feeding people. Whether it is preparing food to eat yourself or with your family, or making food to bring for breakfast or supper at the Out of the Rain Shelter, or bringing non-perishable food for your food bank, this is a community that knows about the importance of food.

When I lived in Victoria, before moving to Ontario for seminary, I worked for the Victoria Cool Aid Society. An off-hand remark I made to a coworker one day made me realize the importance of food in a new way. In the middle of a particularly busy day I remember saying that I really needed to go and take a break to eat my lunch before I got too cranky to do my job. As the words left my mouth, I stopped and realized the irony of what I was saying. Here I was, working at Rock Bay Landing where people often come hungry and cranky, taking a break to eat so that I could continue to function well in my job. I like to hope that this realization gave me a lot more compassion for the people with whom I worked both here in Victoria and around the world through my work with PWRDF.

I think it works like that in so many other areas of life as well. We have known for some time that ensuring kids in school have enough to eat will help them with their school work. Gillian is going to tell you about one of our PWRDF partners who is doing just that….

[Gillian: Many families in Haiti are stretched beyond their capacity to feed everyone. Children are often kept out of school so that they can help support their families by working. Through the Fred says “some like it hot” food campaign, we are providing hot lunches at schools in Haiti, which encourages parents to send their kids to school system and takes some strain off of the parents. Giving the children the food helps them bring them back to school and keeps them focused to study and learn. So far, PWRDF, in partners with the episcopal church in Haiti and CFGB (Canadian Food-grains Bank), we have helped feed nearly 8000 students, increase the enrolment in schools and the academic performance of schools substantially. ]

So here in Haiti they recognized Jesus in the hot lunch given so students could learn.

In 2009 I had the opportunity to visit a food relief project also being carried out through our partner the Canadian Foodgrains Bank. The project was responding to longstanding drought in Kenya, providing beans, maize, and oil to families. The standard process in each village was for the hungriest, as identified by the community council of elders, to be the ones selected to benefit from the food aid. Unfortunately everyone can receive food in a food relief project – only the worst of the worst – because there isn’t enough to give to everyone in the region. Each village seemed to accept this, except one. One village we visited, down in the Masai Mara took a different approach.

The beneficiaries who were selected to receive the food aid still lined up to get their sacks of beans and maize. However as they left with the bags, they stopped, opened them up, and scooped out the top 10% of the beans and maize into another pile. From this pile, the rest of the villagers were able to have some food to supplement their meagre diets.

Here in Kenya, they recognized Jesus in the sharing of beans and maize.

In November, the youth council met together with the PWRDF board members and diocesan representatives in Toronto. Joining us was Bishop Griselda of the Episcopal Church in Cuba, one of our PWRDF partners. Bishop Griselda shared with us the incredible story of some of the Cuban farmers. In some of their communities, the church was finding that a number of people were going hungry, despite the fact that they had the land to grow food for them to eat.

So they began to teach people in community development: teaching about gender issues, farming techniques, and nutrition. This has led to better access to healthy food, increased income from the sales of food, and a decrease in gender-based violence through improved understanding between the men and the women within the communities. People have become more confident, creative, and hopeful through learning how to farm for themselves.

In fact, Bishop Griselda told us, some of the communities had grown so much food that they began to bring it to the church. They would place it on and around the altar to be blessed before sharing it with the less fortunate in their community.

The Cuban farmers recognize Jesus in the growing, blessing, and sharing of farmed produce.

A little over a year ago, I found myself in South Africa, visiting PWRDF’s partner, the Keiskamma Trust. Keiskamma operates in a region of South Africa with an HIV/AIDS infection rate of 40%, with one in three pregnant mothers carrying the disease and potentially infecting their child. Keiskamma has been working for a decade to reduce the rate of HIV/AIDS by providing education around and access to life-saving anti-retroviral medications.

One thing that we have learned about Antiretroviral medications is that they need to be taken with food. What some of our partners have been finding is that people have stopped taking their medications because of a lack of food. With partners in Mozambique, we have been helping to fund food baskets so that people can continue their medications. Our partners at Keiskamma got people in the community together to start organic gardens to grow produce for those needing more in their diets to continue their medication regime.

They recognize Jesus in the giving of food so that health can be restored.

These are the stories of just a few of the people we have the privilege to partner with through our work with PWRDF. This is the work that we all participate in.

Again, thinking back to our gospel reading this morning, an interesting thing about the story of the road to Emmaus is that they didn’t actually recognize Jesus right away. They almost missed him. They encountered Jesus and travelled with him as a stranger – yet welcomed him in to share their food anyway.

This is the work of PWRDF that we all are a part of. Most of us have never shaken the hand of one of the Cuban farmers or served a hot lunch to the Hatian students. But through the work of PWRDF and the sharing of lives and stories back and forth – much like the exchange on the road to Emmaus – we participate in that work. We participate in God’s work. We are walking along the road together. Welcoming those strange or unknown to us, never knowing where or in whom we will find Jesus.

It wasn’t until travellers invited Jesus in to share food with them that they saw. It was in the breaking of the bread, when Jesus did what Jesus does in the way that only Jesus does it that they recognized their companion on the walk.

I wonder when have you and I been completely oblivious to the work of Jesus in and around us? I wonder when we have missed Jesus appearing right in front of our face, or missed the work of Jesus in the world because we are so caught up in the drama of our daily lives.

As we prepare to come together to the table to break bread in the way that Jesus taught us, I pray that we would recognize Jesus in the friends and strangers beside us, across the table, on our streets, and around the world. I pray that our eyes would be opened and Jesus made known to us whenever and however we share food.

A Sermon for November 17, 2013

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I was invited to speak about the work of PWRDF at two churches this morning, in Woodstock and in Huntingford, Ontario. As last week was the launch of our new “Fred Says” food security campaign, I focused on food with the stories that I told.

This is, more or less, the text of what I said. Typos are likely and I know I ad-libbed as I went – for one thing they used the old lectionary (and only read 2 of 29 verses of the OT reading) so I had to quickly make up a connection between what I’d prepared (Isaiah) and what they read (Micah) and the gospel. And, as I was told they wanted to have pictures, I had to write it out to give to the person controlling the powerpoint slides so that they would know when to switch from one picture to the next. Most of the pictures I used were my own, from trips to Kenya and South Africa, though I took some from the PWRDF Flickr account (licensed under Creative Commons).

We seem to be at that time of year when we our readings get “all end-timesy”. (That is the technical term I learnt in seminary.)

I hear the gospel this morning and it is a little disheartening: wars and insurrections, earthquakes, plagues, and, if I can add one, typhoons… There is enough devastation in the world, we don’t need any more.

And then I went back to the Isaiah reading and was a little encouraged: That is going to end. In the words of a social media campaign, “It gets better”.

But what about the here and the now. I’m not one to sit and wait for that switch because I believe that God has called us to be involved in our world NOW.

Reflecting on that change between the destruction in the gospel and the hope in Isaiah, I was reminded of a technique I’ve used in my counselling practice called  “The Miracle Question”.

The Miracle Question goes something like this:

   After church is over today, we’ll all head to the hall to have coffee and then you’ll head home, have lunch, and do whatever you need to do the rest of today:  finish the crossword, take the dog for a walk, help your kids with their homework. You’ll eat dinner, maybe watch some TV. Then it will be time to go to bed. Everyone in your household is quiet and you are sleeping in peace.

In the middle of the night, a miracle happens and the problem of world hunger – the availability of food – is solved! But because it happens when you are sleeping, you have no idea that there was an overnight miracle that eliminated world hunger!

So when you wake up tomorrow morning, what might be the small change that will make you say to yourself, “Wow! Something must have happened! The problem is gone!”

It might be something as simple as not seeing the guy who is usually panhandling on the corner or not having anyone show up at the soup kitchen for lunch. It might be a little closer to home, and your kitchen pantry actually has food in it.

This is the question and the contrast that I hear echoed in the words of our readings this morning.

And then there is a follow up question, one that needs to be asked in my counselling sessions as much as it needs to be asked this morning:

“What are we going to do about it?”

We have identified the problem, we know there is a solution, and so now we are called to action.

So let me tell you a little bit about the work that you are already doing – yes, that’s right, I said you are already doing!

The Primate’s World Relief and Development Fund is working on behalf of Canadian Anglicans on issues relating to food security – whether someone has access to healthy food every day – both within Canada and around the world. This is your Fund! And we rely on your support, both in prayer and finances, to support the amazing work that is going on around the world.

Our primary mode of operating is through partnership, which means we link up with local, grassroots organizations who are doing incredible work around the world and support them in whatever ways they need.

We participate in relief work:

Right now, as you may know, there is an incredible amount of relief needed in the Philippines. Our partners there have already delivered 5000 food packages. As of Thursday, PWRDF had received $47,000 worth of donations towards typhoon Haiyan relief – every dollar of that to be matched by the federal government.

In 2009 I was able to visit Kenya through our partners, the Canadian Foodgrains Bank. There I spent a month with a food distribution project in rural Kenya.

Each community was unique, though the stories we heard were all the same: the big rains had not come in over three years. The small rains had come, but the big ones, which sustained life, hadn’t fallen.

In each community we would sit with the villagers and hear their stories, hear about their families, their hopes and their dreams. One man cried as he told us of the shame of not being able to feed his family.

Through the Canadian Foodgrains bank, families would receive giant bags of dried beans, dried maize, and a 3L jug of oil.

It doesn’t seem like a lot, but it is nutritious and will feed a family of eight for a month.

The challenge of a food distribution project is that you can’t go to everyone. The distribution centres were chosen for their centralized location, but people still had to travel to get home. So they would strap the food onto their donkey, or figure out some other way to carry it, and begin the long trek home. Some would walk all day to get to and from the distribution point.

Some of the communities requested to have a “food for work” program whereby we would help them develop their community in exchange for food: they would work and we made sure they had food.

So one community we visited had begun an irrigation project: they put canals through the fields and had dug a reservoir. Their hope was that they would be able to capture what rain did fall and prevent such a dire situation from happening again.

Our international and national development work is less of an emergency response to disaster and more partnership with communities to develop their capacity to support themselves.

This past December and January I had the opportunity to visit a partner in South Africa, the Keiskamma Trust.

The Trust is based in Hamburg, in the Eastern Cape. This is a part of South Africa that was badly affected by the apartheid years.

Decades of neglect and mismanagement and a lack of basic healthcare and education means that this is a very impoverished part of the country.

The HIV/AIDS rate is around 40% here, with at least one in three pregnant mothers being HIV positive.

Up until about 10 years ago, this part of the Eastern Cape did not have access to any antiretroviral medications (ARVs) to make living a healthy life with HIV possible and to prevent the transmission of HIV from mum to babe.

In the early 2000s, South African physician, Dr Carol Hofmeyr, came to live in Hamburg. She quickly realized the need for ARVs in the community and started the Trust as a way of educating and providing health care to people in the community.

One of the things she did was train community health workers who do HIV testing and education as well as go into people’s homes and ensure that they continue to take their ARVs as prescribed.

Through their efforts, the HIV/AIDS rate has dropped in this region and they have been able to, in many cases, prevent the transmission of HIV from positive mum to baby.

One of the things that we have come to realize with ARV treatment is that it only works if you have food. Our partners at Keiskamma have approached that in a unique way: living in a place that is fertile enough to grow food, they have begun an organic gardening project that teaches gardening skills to community members, employs community members, and feeds the community.

However not everywhere is that fortunate. Our partners in Mozambique are also working with people affected by HIV/AIDS. Except they don’t have the same ability to do gardening. What our partners were finding is that people were having to stop taking their life-saving medication because they didn’t have any food.

So they began to give out food baskets of beans, corn flour, oil, and fresh vegetables – enough to last for two months – to people taking ARVs and the difference was night and day. Life and death.

As of right now, they have been able to give out 400 foodbaskets to people in the community living with HIV so that they can continue to take their ARVs. Our goal as PWRDF is to raise enough money for 600 more baskets by the New Year.

Food baskets. Organic gardening. Training Community Health Workers. Irrigation projects.

On their own, they can seem like small steps towards eliminating hunger. But together they add up to a beautiful vision of what is possible if we all work together to make that “overnight miracle”  a reality.

Amen.

Looking Forward

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This can probably be filed under the category of “rant”. Also, under the category of “Gillian is procrastinating from writing a paper”.

I am constantly asked what kind of church or other setting I would like to end up in once I have completed my studies here. The question came up again this week with someone at school and I think that I gave my most coherent answer to date. Reflecting on my answer later at home I realized I’d still gotten it wrong. Or, rather, the question we are asking is wrong.

So I put the question out on twitter and continued to think about the subject.

 

I was surprised when I was interviewed by the Diocesan Committee on Ordained Ministry last year to be asked questions about parish specifics: size and location of where I might want to work, whether I would like to be full- or part-time, paid or unpaid. While I understand that they have to work out if the diocese even needs more priests, I had hoped that they would have had a more forward-looking view of things: Will this model of ministry that we have inherited over the last five billion years (only a slight exaggeration) still be functional and/or relevant when I am finished? When I shared this observation with my bishop, I added that I did not really want to leave my job, move across the country, and go to school for three years in order to maintain a status quo that is broken. (Or, as Dr Horrible says: “Because the status is not quo!”)

It is broken because we are spending more money on maintaining our buildings than on active ministry. It is broken because it isn’t working: the average age of people attending (mainline) churches is increasing and the number of people attending is decreasing. Soon we are all going to die out. Die out, that is, unless we can figure out a different way to do things.

So don’t ask me what kind of priest I want to be when I am all done. Instead ask what your community needs and let us work together to figure out what we can do and where a priest might fit into the mix.

Approved and Accepted

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Spring is in the air, summer is not far away, and changes are afoot.

Some of you may know that this last year has been a year of a lot of change and transition for me. My temporary full-time position came to an end and so I took a two-month leave and ran away to Africa to hang out with my sister in South Africa for Christmas and New Years. I came home to working two jobs on a casual/on-call basis and have been working (nearly) full time hours at that for the last four months. I’m going to keep doing that for the next two months…

…and then I’m moving to London, Ontario!

Let me back up a little bit further. A little over a year ago, I embarked on a fairly intense process of intentional discernment with the idea of determining whether or not I am being called into a position of ordained ministry – that is, to be a priest. That process has entailed both one-on-one conversations with my spiritual director, the priest at my current church, and the Anglican bishop of my diocese as well as group discernment (what I have called reverse group counselling with myself as the lone ‘client’ and a whole group of people talking with me), formal interviews, and weekend-long assessments. It has been both exhausting and intensely rewarding.

Three weeks ago I had a full weekend ‘retreat’ (aka Church Big Brother) with a group of other candidates from across British Columbia where we were in conversation with assessors from all over the province. Their job was to assess our competencies, strengths, weaknesses, and gifts for ministry. The resulting report heartily recommended that I be approved for training and ordination as a priest.

Step two: school. A funny thing happens when you say you won’t do something. You frequently end up doing it. My standard response to the question of whether or not I would do a PhD when I announced I was doing my MA in Counselling was, “No, because I’d like to be done school by 30.” Well, here I am, past that, and going back to school, not for a PhD but for another Masters. Yesterday I received my offer of acceptance from Huron University College (on the campus of Western University in London – anyone else see the humour of me moving east to go to a school called Western??) to begin study towards a Master of Divinity degree, starting in September.  This is a three-year program approved by the Anglican Church of Canada for training postulants for ministry within the Anglican Church.

As much as I am loathe to leave Victoria – I love it here – I am looking forward to living back in Ontario after nearly 20 years! I’ll be closer to family and friends than I’ve been in years and am looking forward to exploring a new corner of the country. Now all I need to do is figure out how to get my stuff from here to there and collect boxes to put it all in!

Friday Photo

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Pretty much every minute I was not at work last week, I was at church. I spent all of Saturday morning at the Cathedral (left), my home place of worship and both a building and a family of people that I am coming to love very much, for a leadership development morning with others on the parish council. I spent all of Sunday morning at St John the Divine (right) where I spoke on PWRDF at both the 8am (insanely early) and 10am services.

A PWRDF Sunday

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I case you were wondering what I preached this morning… (I’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of that placemat story!)

Given at St John the Divine, Victoria. Third Sunday of Advent: March 11, 2012. Gospel: John 2:13-22.

I remember my first encounter with The Primate’s World Relief and Development Fund (PWRDF). I was young, perhaps 11 or 12 years old, and what stands out are those placemats. We’ve all seen them… from coast to coast, many Anglican church potlucks have had those placemats covering the tables where we sit and eat together. But those placemats are not what gave me a passion for the Primate’s fund, nor are they what has kept me involved in it, nearly 20 years later… Rather it was the stories told by a passionate person in my parish who knew about and believed in the stories of what the Primate’s fund is doing around the world.

But more on those stories in a minute…

First, who am I and what do I do with PWRDF? In my day-to-day life, I am a counsellor with the Cool Aid Society. In my weekend life, I worship down the street at Christ Church Cathedral where I, amongst other things, serve on Parish Council. With the Primate’s World Relief and Development Fund, I am the youth council representative for the ecclesiastical province of BC and the Yukon. That is a fancy way of saying that my role is to bring the voices of youth in BC and the Yukon to the national board of the Primate’s Fund and then turn around and bring the stories of PWRDF partners to people, particularly youth, in the same region. I am not on the board, rather I am part of youth council: a separate and autonomous entity composed of a dozen youth from across this country who are passionate about international relief and development, and social justice. Youth who both create programs and resources for Canadian Anglican youth and who tell the stories of PWRDF to youth.

Why PWRDF? For one thing, it is homegrown, beginning as an Anglican response to disasters within Canada and over the last fifty years spreading to have a national and international relief and development focus.

But what I love about PWRDF is the model we use to operate. We don’t import “western experts” into countries and tell locals how best to fix the problems in their regions and communities. We don’t spend precious resource monies on a large staff or on bringing products overseas. Rather, we partner with organizations who are already working on the ground in their own communities and support and resource them in continuing the work they are already doing.

And people like myself volunteer to tell their stories…

In relief efforts, our partnership might look like providing the funds for an organization to buy precious food to be distributed in drought-stricken or famine-ridden areas.

In development, it looks like translating documents into indigenous languages to help a people group re-learn the skills to grow and harvest their own crops rather than rely on corrupt corporations who will under-pay and overwork them.

Or it may look like providing the start-up money for a women’s microcredit organization, like the one we heard about this morning in Mozambique. In fact, with that organization in Mozambique, one woman who first entered with just a cow and an idea to produce and sell milk to other villagers to support her family now owns not only a herd of cattle but also the land they graze on and she is able to employ many of her neighbours.

In relief, it looks like the villages in Kenya that I visited in 2009. There the Canadian Foodgrains bank, of which PWRDF is a member, was involved in distributing food to thousands of individuals who were affected by the devastating East African drought. We travelled around regions of the country, bringing giant bags of beans and maize and jugs of oil: enough supplies of food to feed a family of eight for a month. In each village we went to, we sat down with a group of people from the village to hear their stories. In each village, the stories were heart-breakingly similar: the rains had not come. Yes, there had been sprinkles here and there, but the big rains, the rains that nourished the ground and gave life to growing crops, had not come for five, six years. Crops would not and could not grow. The livestock that had not been sold, given away, or eaten, simply sat in the shade of scraggly trees all day, as there was no grass to feed on.

We met a woman, 34 years old, the 4th wife of her husband, with eight children of her own – who could finally feed her children, including the young one still breastfeeding. In another village, a man tearfully told us of how grateful he was for the food relief for his village because, as he said it, if we had not come, some of the people in the village had found “chemicals” to use to end their problems as they could not bear the shame of being unable to feed their families.

Yet it was not all tales of woe. One village in the Mt Kenya region refused to roll over and let the drought win. They did not want to receive food relief… While we sat and talked, they spoke of the projects they wanted to do to develop their village so that they could better withstand another drought. So we talked about how to set up a “food for work” program in which we provided food and resources for irrigation and they, in return, would create an irrigation project in their village so that when the rains did come, they would be able to capture and save as much rain as possible for as long as possible.

In relief and development it looks like our partnership with the Organization of Eelam Refugee Rehabilitation or OfERR, an Indian/Sri Lankan organization that PWRDF has partnered with for 30 years. OfERR works with refugees of the Sri Lankan civil war who have taken up residence in refugee camps in South India. They not only help with getting identification documents for the refugees and skills retraining, but they provide community support to the Sri Lankan Tamil refugees living in India. When the 2004 Asian Tsunami hit India and Sri Lanka, OfERR was able to assist in the relief and rebuilding of the communities in which they lived, giving back to a place that had accepted them as refugees. This past week, a priest of our diocese and a friend of mine left for two weeks in India and Sri Lanka. He goes with a number of other Canadians associated with PWRDF to spend time with OfERR, supporting their work and, if everything going according to plan, to bear witness to one of the first groups of the 100,000 Tamil refugees as they return to their home in Sri Lanka.

In development, it looks like the Keiskamma Trust, a PWRDF partner organization in the Eastern Cape region of South Africa, an area of South Africa hardest hit by HIV/AIDS. Founded by an artist, who also happens to be a medical doctor, the Trust provides medical support to individuals and families struggling with HIV/AIDS. I had the opportunity to meet the founder and director of the Trust at PWRDF’s board meeting last fall. Her vision is extraordinary: knowing that health is more than just physical health, she has expanded the original medial clinic to include both a women’s arts collective and a children’s music academy. The medical centre works at providing health care and medications to a group of people so frequently shunned and stigmatized in their society. The arts collective brings women together to create masterpieces of fabric arts that have been exhibited around the world. The music academy gives the children something bigger than themselves to be a part of and has given them the opportunity to tour and play for large audiences in cathedrals and on game reserves throughout South Africa. Not only do I know the stories of these individuals through meeting the founder and director, but also my sister has been in South Africa since August teaching music at the academy.

Reflecting back to words we heard read this morning, the Gospel reading gave us quite a different picture of Jesus than we typically see on Sunday School flannel boards or pictures mounted on the wall. In this story, Jesus goes into the Temple in Jerusalem and uses a whip to drive out all of the vendors and money-changers. Wow. To put into perspective what these guys were doing… it would be like you coming to church this morning and having to pay exorbitant fees because you needed to change your Canadian dollars into American dollars in order to buy the things you need for worship: your leaflet, your hymn book, or your prayer book. Ridiculous. Completely Unjust. But that is what was going on.

If we look around us, there are injustices everywhere. We have before us a model of Jesus taking action and, to use the words of one of the Marks of Mission: “seek[ing] to transform the unjust structures of society”. In our gospel reading, Jesus is actively challenging, in a very visible and somewhat violent way, the structures of his society that were creating injustice.

Another one of the Marks of Mission is “To respond to human need by loving service.”

Human need is all around us and through PWRDF we have an amazing vehicle for acting on that need. We are called to respond and we are constantly challenged in scripture to follow the example of Jesus.

For me, a big part of that is the work that I do with PWRDF and what I would challenge you with today. I’m not saying that everyone has to go out there and start overturning tables, though sometimes that might work, but what can you do, what can I do, to follow the example of Jesus, to work against injustice and to respond to real human need with what resources we have at hand.

Because I have seen that together we do make a difference. We can make Another World Possible.

Amen.

“The Irish Poet” attends Synod

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Last night was the opening evening of this years synod for the Diocese of BC. I hadn’t intended to go to any of it except the registration time to staff a PWRDF information table, but I ended up going to the opening Eucharist. It was the usual collection of priests, deacons, bishops, and bunch of random lay-keeners… and the Irish Poet.

The Cathedral is a downtown church. We’re not as downtown as the churches that are right beside Our Place, but downtown we are. The south lawn of the Cathedral is a great place to hang out with shopping carts and buggies full of belongings and on cold days like the last few, people living on the street will come inside the church whenever it is open.

Last night was no exception. Mid-way through the service, a bent man in a long jacket carrying a bulky bag over his shoulder, long stringy hair falling in front of his face, walked in and sat down in one of the last pews in a side chapel. The words of the bishop chanting the liturgy were punctuated by loud words and curses from the man who had walked in. I sensed one of the priests sitting a the back head out to speak with a verger who came in to keep an eye on the situation and I hoped that would be all that was needed. I work with this population every day… can’t I have a church service to myself?

As he continued to speak, one of the deacons went over to sit and talk with him. I tried to focus on the words the bishop was saying… “You who sat with outcasts and sinners…” A chuckle escaped me. The irony. The timing. Am I supposed to have a different response than just sitting here and receiving from this service? I just want a break from working with folks like him. I don’t want to do this right now, God.  Can’t someone else just deal with this? But no one else really wants to “deal with this” – it is uncomfortable and a little scary. But there were the words of the liturgy… Do we actually get what we are supposed to be and do with the outcasts of our society?

Then it was time to go up for communion. I knelt, elbow to elbow with others – not outcasts – and received the bread and wine. As I walked back to my seat, the deacon who had been sitting with the man at the back of the church got up to take her turn for communion. So I walked over, “Can I sit here?” “Sure, I don’t care. You’re beautiful.” Yeah, how is that for an opener. I sat, we talked. He had an Irish accent and I think I recognized him as the one we call “The Irish Poet” at work. He ranted on about church and religion and how it is all full of bullshit. I agreed, after all, so much of the tradition and trappings associated with church really does seem like a load of bullshit. We talked some more. About smoking, the pope, Beethoven, and various other things.

Then he got agitated and got up, so I walked outside with him. Standing on the front steps, I was shivering in just my sweater, but he didn’t seem to notice the cold. We talked more. Then, just as quickly, the conversation was over. He said he had to pee and was going to pee on the church. I suggested he head around to the side of the building so he wouldn’t be in plain view and he said he didn’t care. “Well, it was nice to talk with you. Have a good evening.” No acknowledgement as he walked away.

Still shivering, I went back inside just as the recessional hymn was ending and all the priests in their fancy robes were congregating at the back of the church, oblivious to the conversations that had been going on out of their line of sight. Despite our best attempts at “reaching out” to the broader community we find ourselves in, I felt a strange disconnect in that 10 step walk from the front steps with the Poet to the back of the nave with the procession. How do we bridge that gap?

Placemats and Genocide

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When I tell people that I am on PWRDF’s Youth Council, the first predictable response is “What is PW… something?”. After explaining it as the Primate’s World Relief and Development Fund, the relief, development, and social justice arm of the Anglican Church of Canada (pwrdf.org), the next question usually asks about monkeys.

All joking aside, I am delighted to be a part of the Youth Council because I believe strongly in the work that PWRDF does and want every Canadian Anglican (or really just every Canadian) to know about it and understand the importance of their and their church’s support.

My first awareness of PWRDF has a very specific start-date: I can still picture the placemat. I grew up in a parish in the Diocese of Ontario. Our parish had (still has?) a wonderful tradition of Wednesday morning Lenten services followed by breakfast together in the parish hall. In my memory, there were a good number of people who would attend before heading off to work – my parents faithfully went every week, bringing their two young children. At breakfast, each long table was set with PWRDF placemats. I remember sitting at the table, looking at the pictures and being captivated by the images portrayed. However, what stands out to me even more than the images on the placemats is the memory of a church lady standing before everyone with one of the placemats and exhorting us to Stop! and Pay Attention! to the images and messages contained on the placemats and then Do Something! about it.

You see, this was the season of Lent 1994, a time in which the tensions in Rwanda were at the boiling point. We, through PWRDF and other organizations, were being urged to take a stand and write letters to our government to urge them to support actions to help prevent a genocide. I didn’t fully understand the gravity of the situation being described until years later, upon reading accounts of the events and putting 2 + 2 together. However for me, PWRDF placemats will always be a reminder of a call to action, of a call to seek justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with my God.

Easter Morning

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I ended up at church far more than I had intended over the last week: six of the last seven days. I even participated in all/nearly all of the services in the Easter Triduum (I am not going to Evensong tonight).

Last night was the Easter Vigil service and, true to the term “vigil”, it went late. The Easter Vigil service is usually one of my favourites and I did appreciate it last evening. However, the service which impacted me most this year was the 6am sunrise service I attended this morning. One of the churches in this area holds a sunrise service down in Cadboro Bay, one of my “thinking” places. It was actually warm-ish this morning, making it one of the first years I can remember when it was not freezing cold and/or raining for the service.

As I was hurrying (because I thought I was late) along the roads and pathways – up the hill, through the university, and down the other side, I was able to see the pink-orange glow of the sun coming up over the ocean. Here I was, rushing to “see Jesus,” perhaps not unlike the early disciples rushed to the tomb once the women had told them He is Risen. Like the disciples, there will still be doubts about how the story unfolds. Unlike the disciples, I have 2000 years of hindsight to know what I will find when I reach the beach. However that sense of anticipation, expectation, and, eventually, joy is still there. Let’s never lose the wonder.